Heterodox Academy

I have no great love of conservative politics, but there's a convincing argument to be made that their ideas and views are routinely suppressed by media outside of explicitly partisan media outlets (i.e. Fox News or talk radio).

There are a number of studies that back up this claim. A 2008 study[0] found that 88% of journalists donate to the Democratic party. Jonathan Haidt has shown[1] that non-economics social sciences skew more than 14-1 liberal to conservative (and that universities have not always been so skewed).

For anyone who believes these statistics are not based on overt discrimination based on political viewpoint, a recent study[2] showed that discrimination by party is stronger than that of race. The study did so by reproducing a landmark study that demonstrated the existence of unconscious racial bias (the implicit association test), but instead using political indicators. They found that partisan political positions triggered implicit associations 50% stronger than that of racial biases. There is also a recent book called "Passing on the Right"[3] which provides some personal narratives of conservative academics.

If you're relying on academic knowledge to provide you a sense of reality, you're viewing reality through a lens that is biased to a 93% degree towards one political pole, and then receiving that knowledge through a media system which is biased to an 88% degree towards that same political pole.

Even if you, like me, generally believe that the…

I completely agree, which is precisely why I think believe the role of the employment process ought to be to screen everyone by fair (in a way that everyone agrees on) and transparent metrics. 'All fronts' hopefully means fixing every issue encountered simultaneously at the local level.

If instead we're adding a 'fudge factor' based on race, gender, or other measure of 'privilege', we're just hoping that fudge factor in hiring makes up for problems elsewhere, and it can paradoxically make things even worse.

Think about a lot of the (often very well justified) complaints that minority and other hires have with the current situation: they feel like, or they feel that other people believe, that they are simply a 'diversity hire' that doesn't deserve to be there. They feel constantly pressured to 'prove themselves' under the suspicion that the bar was 'lowered to let them in'. And the entire structure of un-blinded affirmative action exacerbates the situation, because nobody is allowed to know how big the fudge factors are, neither the minorities nor the dominant group. Under that situation, how can there anything but suspicion and mutual distrust?

Under a provably blinded hiring process, none of those should be an issue, because the process is completely transparent and agreed to ahead of time.

Other people have said this much more eloquently than me:

https://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/05/12/the-amazing-1969-prophecy/

> Postmodern thinkers are not preventing anyone from speaking, are they? You don't have to like Derrida today, and it's perfectly fine to disagree with Deleuze, Guattari or Fanon...

Depends on who you include under the definition of "postmodern thinkers". I don't hear a whole lot of noise coming from Academic Philosophers per se, but the intellectual heirs of the postmodernists as expressed in the social sciences and various intersectional "studies" programs certainly seem to make a big deal of deplatforming people these days.

> This sounds to me that Peterson is pissed because people in humanities tend to oppose capitalism.

No. he tells you why he is mad, why invent reasons?

He is mad because of the lack of gratitude at the improvements in absolute standard of living (even though he admits that relative inequality is a problem). As a clinical counselor for many years he has seen the harms caused by persistent resentment.

He is mad because his colleagues in the humanities and social sciences have, in recent decades, consistently opposed the free exchange of ideas on college campuses. He is far from the only academic to voice such concerns[0].

He is mad because of the dearth of good scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

[0]https://heterodoxacademy.org/

smart enough to see the illogic of religious belief

A lot of religious people don't take their beliefs literally. It's more stories that they know are just stories (or just don't care if they're literally true or not), but that illustrate some important point and provide a shared context for talking about it.

Like how it doesn't matter if the "640k should be enough for anybody" quote is actually true or not, or Paul Bunyan and John Henry and the rest of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion , or the Story of Mel the Real Programmer, or the 500 mile email, etc. They illustrate important principles and shared cultural values, and strict historical accuracy isn't actually that important to their usefulness.

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hold more complex thoughts than simple prejudices.

The annoying thing about prejudices, is they're often not so much flat wrong as deliberately under-fitting the data for performance reasons or bootstrapping a model for a new environment with data from an old environment. For example, there's a lovely article about how affirmative action quotas encourage racism here: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/05/12/the-amazing-1969-prophecy/ .

Evolution has been proven experimentally, so I'm not sure why you're picking on that specifically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_evolution

Archaeology isn't a science either, even though I've studied it myself and ancient civilisations are a particular favourite area of study for me. Archaeologists and historians in general frequently do things that wouldn't match the usual understanding of the scientific process: that doesn't mean we shouldn't study history, but comparing the fields credibility to that of physics is really problematic.

But to clarify, when I said "social science" I was referring to people who explicitly call themselves that. Archaeology and even psychology wouldn't count under that definition - but if someone actually says they are a professor of social science, to me that's an immediate red flag because the "research" produced by such people is in my experience usually just a complicated and expensive form of personal politics blogging.

Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of good talks on this topic. There's a paper here:

http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-political-diversity/

> Several times he references the Stevens/Haidt results, but doesn't seem to acknowledge this finding from Stevens/Haidt (https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/08/10/the-google-memo-what...):

Excellent citation. I think it overreaches a little in attributing the position that women don't perform as well as men at software engineering, ie. they label many claims red which people have attributed to Damore, but he didn't make those claims; I believe Damore said the exact opposite actually, that women absolutely can perform at the same level, but that women simply aren't interested in CS careers. Your cite covers this in the conclusions, so it's pretty fair overall.

As your citation explains, in societies with greater gender equality, women have so many other choice of careers that CS just isn't an attractive option. Perhaps it's not attractive for reasons that can be changed, but those reasons should be investigated, not simply assumed to be driven by sexism.